Baku 2017

Islamic Solidarity Games are a large and significant international sports event. In 2017, we developed a website for it. The main customer requirement was an easy-to-use website that provides all the necessary information about the games and an opportunity to buy tickets. What is more, the project deadline was short and our team needed to present the ready website before the start of the games.

With the time being limited, we had to start working on the project as soon as possible. Having gathered all the requirements, our team decided on the following development challenges:

• create simple UI with intuitive navigation
• develop Admin part with wide functionality
• enable tracking competition results and schedule
• choose optimal tech stack for viewing videos and photos
• include easy switching between the languages

The website had to become the main source of information about the competition for visitors from over 25 countries. That’s why we need to prepare it for a huge operation load. Our software engineers realized how huge the responsibilities were and presented the solution that fits all the unique requirements. In almost 3 months, our team managed to create an interactive and informative website for this sports event.

The home page was built according to the principle of live information and includes all the latest news, photos, and videos about the contest. Moreover, the home page elements needed to be easily manageable by the admin. This was a demanding task but we coped and the customer received an attractive page that involved all the desired components. We involved the previews of numerous pages where the users can find out more about the events.

To improve user experience, we added filtering the news by events, countries, and dates. The users can easily share the latest updates about the contest via email and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. While reading the news, the users can see the photos related to the event with a short description. This is a multilanguage website and that’s why while completing all the tasks we needed to consider it. Not to overload the website, we used Azure cloud services to store all the translations.

Photo and video galleries are the pages most users are interested in. To find certain media as fast as possible, we included search filters such as an event, country, and date. For increased user engagement, we filled the interface with picture and video previews. To flexible scale up for high performance, we used Azure Blob storage.

Keeping the user updated with the schedule and competition results was a significant task for our developer team. While developing an admin part, we paid attention to the seamless information updates. Every results page is connected to the photo and video gallery of a certain game or match.

A highly functional and complex admin part was one of the main customer requirements. The main admin part features involved adding news, articles, updating the sportsmen rating and competition results in real-time. For it, we opted for Angular framework as it was the most beneficial technology for the unique customer requirements.

We used the ASP.NET Boilerplate as a project base. We have also integrated the Azure services such as search to implement the required functionality of the application. This framework helped us create a functional and lightweight infrastructure at the same time. Azure Search allows to load and access any information easily and quickly.

We opted for Azure and Azure CDN for fast content load, better performance, and improved user experience.

Angular framework for the admin part was the best choice because it allowed us to effortlessly maintain the code and make the necessary improvements.

Creating such a website was a major task for our developer team. Such a sports event attracted the attention of thousands of sports fans from all over the world. Our team realized that mistakes are unacceptable and paid much attention to creating an intuitive UI and fast load speeds. Within a short project deadline, we developed a user-friendly and speedy website. In a few months, our team presented a solution that presented all the information about the Islamic Solidarity Games in Baku.